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CHARLES SUMNER 



AN ADDRESS 



HENRY G. SPAULDING 



BOSTON 

PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO. 

1911 



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(So mg Wifp 

JANE LANGWORTHY SPAULDING 

To thee, dear comfort of my later years, '^ 

I dedicate this speech. Too deep for tears 

These thoughts and memories of my pensive age; 

And yet, between the lines, on every page, 

I see thy cheerful smile or gladdening eye; 

Or else the look that said. Let this go by. 

The work thus done seems mine; but. none the less, 

•Tis partly thine, for thou did'st check excess,— 

And, unto all I said of Sumner's truth. 

Thou gavest, precious gift, the dew of youth. 



PREFACE. 



The raison d'etre of this Address is given in its opening para- 
graph, where it is said that "great men need not that we praise 
them: the need is ours, that we know them." In this, his cen- 
tennial year, Charles Sumner is too little known. The virtues 
which in his lifetime created hostility are hidden, not in the 
"excess of light" which attended his death, when his greatness 
of soul was almost universally acknowledged, but in the dark- 
ness which has come from misunderstanding or misinformation. 
Unfounded traditions and idle anecdotes have obscured his white- 
souled integrity and have dimmed the "sweetness and light" 
which were so harmoniously blended in his character. 

Those who were privileged to be much in his presence knew 
well that his moral earnestness and his passion for justice were 
united with a most highly cultured and genial personality. He 
was an impersonation not only of Conscience, but also of those 
human traits which make men loved by those who enjoy their 
friendship. 

While I do not claim that this Address is the final word about 
the great Massachusetts senator, I can honestly say that I have 
taken pains to speak on all points by the book and to present the 
man, Charles Sumner, "in his habit as he lived." Part of the 
Address was read, on January 8, 1911, to the congregation of the 
Third Religious Society of Dorchester, Mass. It has also been 
> given to the Newton Tuesday Club. Somewhat condensed, it 
was delivered in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, on May 30, 1911, 
before the Memorial Society of Harvard University. 

HENRY G. SPAULDING. 
1470 Beacon Street, 
Brookline, Mass., August, 1911. 



ADDRESS. 



I am to speak at this time on the character and career of 
Charles Sumner, to the end that we may be moved to imitate 
"his stainless integrity, his supreme devotion to humanity, his 
profound faith in truth, and his unconquerable moral enthusi- 
asm." "Great men," it has well been said, "need not that we 
praise them: the need is ours, that we know them. Whether 
we stand where they stood or have travelled far on ways they 
dreamed not of, we are the richer that they lived." 

Of our illustrious Massachusetts senator — the senator with a 
conscience, as Theodore Parker called him — Governor N. P. 
Banks once said, "He was the foremost man of his time"; while 
the Methodist Bishop Haven named him "the very chiefest of 
our statesmen." To-day these eulogies may strike many persons 
as highly colored exaggerations; yet no one can deny that 
by the verdict of history Charles Sumner is rightly regarded as 
one of our country's greatest men. He was great as an orator 
and as a statesman; greater still as a leader in one of the most 
momentous moral conflicts that the world has yet seen, — the 
conflict between slavery and freedom in America; greatest of 
all as a godly man, of whom Ralph Waldo Emerson could say, 
"I never knew so white a soul." It was my high privilege to 
have known Mr. Sumner in the early years of our Civil War. 
He had throughout my college life been my ideal of the uncor- 
rupt statesman; and, in a nearer view which a personal friend- 
ship gave me, the shining moral quaUties of his character lost 
nothing of their brightness. He was then his country's and 
freedom's wise leader; the Senate's chief; the bosom friend and 
counsellor of Abraham Lincoln, who to the end loved and trusted 
him and looked to him as a confidential adviser. When he 
died in March, 1874, I gave from the pulpit of the church in 
Dorchester, of which I was then the pastor, the first funeral 
discourse on the life and labors of "the white-souled statesman" 



8 

which was delivered in any church in the land. My sainted 
predecessor in the same church, the Rev. Thomas J. Mumford, 
said of Sumner soon after in an editorial in the Christian Register, 
"It was not our great senator's mental superiority which gave 
him a strong hold upon the hearts of the people : it was his moral 
greatness, his fidelity to principle, his courage in expressing his 
real convictions, his transparent candor, his unsuspected integ- 
rity." We shall do well at this time to think on these things. 

Charles Sumner was born in Boston on January 6, 1811. In 
his boyhood's home he had the inestimable treasure of a good 
mother, a woman of strong and heroic traits of character. Her 
pastor, the Rev. H. W. Foote, of King's Chapel, once said: ''The 
son only outlived his mother eight years; but from boyhood to 
age his devotion cheered her and his unselfish love was her 
strong support. Her comfort was his ruling aim in that home 
life which for fifty-five years he shared with her; and, when the 
end came, it was he who stood beside her and gently guided her 
as she went serenely into the Silent Land." In that Boston 
home of honorable poverty Sumner's father planned for the boy 
Charles a good common-school education, to fit him for a life 
of self-help and self-support. Imagine the surprise of that 
father, himself a scholar and a graduate of Harvard, when his 
son came to him one day with some elementary Latin books 
which he had bought with pennies of his own earnings, and asked 
him to hear his recitation. It became at once the hope and 
purpose of Sumner's family to give this boy the preparation at 
least for a college course. 

That in 1826 Charles could enter Harvard College, after a care- 
ful training in the already famous Latin School of Boston, was due 
to a change in his father's circumstances. Just at this critical 
time in his brilhant son's career the elder Sumner was appointed 
sheriff of Suffolk, with a salary large enough to enable him to 
send his boy to Cambridge. But for this the future orator, 
statesman, and anti-slavery leader would have gone to a military 
academy or to West Point. Few of us can doubt that the course 
at Harvard was not only the proper preparation, but was also 
the predestined equipment, for Sumner's great work in life. 



After his graduation in 1830 Sumner went through the Har- 
vard Law School, opened an office in Boston, and was at one time 
the law lecturer at Cambridge, taking the place of his distin- 
guished friend. Judge Joseph Story. The years 1837, 1838, and 
part of 1839 Sumner spent in Europe, advancing and broadening 
his culture in many ways and forming acquaintances among a 
large number of the most eminent European scholars and public 
men. In 1845, when he was but thirty-four years of age, he was 
the orator at Boston's Fourth of July Celebration. His appear- 
ance at this time was striking. "He appeared," said one of 
his biographers, ''the embodiment of manly beauty. He stood 
six feet and three inches in height, erect, handsomely propor- 
tioned, a splendid specimen of vigorous manhood." This Fourth 
of July address put Sumner at once in the very forefront of 
America's orators. Edward Everett called it ''an address of 
unsurpassed fehcity and power." Within a single year after its 
delivery more than ten thousand copies of it were printed and 
circulated; and to-day, sixty-six years later, it is still published 
annually and distributed by the Peace Societies of England and 
our own country. It was the earnest of Sumner's hfe-work, the 
early promise of his determination to bring the civilized world 
up to his own high ideals of justice and humanity. Such seed- 
sowing is never in vain, though the ripe harvest may be long 
delayed. 

The following year, in 1846, Sumner was the orator of the Phi 
Beta Kappa of Harvard. The subject of his oration was "The 
Scholar, the Jurist, the Ai-tist, and the Philanthropist," com- 
memorating under this head his former friends, Pickering, Judge 
Story, Washington Allston, and William Ellery Channing, all of 
them Phi Beta Kappa men in their day. The address was another 
signal triumph for Sumner, the rising orator, and won for him the 
warm praise of such men as Chancellor Kent, Edward Everett, 
and John Quincy Adams. Edward Everett said of it: "It was 
marked with a certain magnificence which I do not well know 
how to parallel. It was an amazingly splendid affair. I never 
heard it surpassed; I do not know that I ever heard it equalled." 
To Sumner himself, Everett, who was at that time the President 



10 

of Harvard, wrote, ''Should you never do anything else, you have 
done enough for fame; but you are, as far as these public efforts 
are concerned, at the commencement of a career destined, I 
trust, to last for long years of ever -increasing usefulness and 
honor." It is pleasant in this connection to remember that 
Sumner's Alma Mater gave him in 1859 the honorary degree of 
LL.D., and also that he left to Harvard in his will all his rare 
books and his splendid collection of autographs, besides giving 
the college an endowment of $1,000 in trust for an annual prize 
for the best dissertation by any student on ''Universal Peace." 

The succeeding years, from 1846 to the time of his election to 
the United States Senate in 1851, are marked by Sumner's grow- 
ing interest in public affairs and the important part which he 
now took as a leader in the anti- slavery cause. But from 
start to finish in his political career he stood firmly for principle 
as against expediency. At the Massachusetts AVhig Convention 
in 1847 he voted with others for a resolution which pledged the 
Whig party to support no candidate for the Presidency who was 
not known to be opposed to the extension of slavery. The 
resolution was lost, but the discussion of it gave Sumner his 
opportunity of going upon the record as unflinchingly hostile to 
the position of those who would stand by their party, whether 
it was right or was wrong. "Far above," he said, "any flicker- 
ing light or battle-lantern of party is the Everlasting Sun of 
Truth in whose beams are the duties of men." There spoke the 
Charles Sumner of immortal fame; and the future events of his 
public career are but a series of brilliant illustrations of those 
great words. Let me repeat them here to-day. "/n the beams 
of the Everlasting Sun of Truth are the duties of men^ 

From December 1, 1851, when Senator Sumner took his seat 
in the Congress of the United States, to March 11, 1874, when he 
died, his life was that of a pubhc servant. He fell at last while 
still at the post of duty, wearing his senatorial harness, pre- 
pared to serve or wait, elsewhere or there. The record of what 
Sumner said and did in these twenty-three years of his Con- 
gressional labors is part of his country's history. At the end he 
could say, looking back over his public career, "There is one 



11 

satisfaction that cannot be taken from me: I have tried to do 
my duty and to advance humanity, keeping Massachusetts fore- 
most in that which is just and magnanimous." 

In leaving Boston for Washington, Mr. Sumner showed again 
that warmly affectionate side of his nature which has not always 
been fully recognized. From New York he wrote to his intimate 
friend, Dr. Howe, of the South Boston Blind Asylum, ''Three 
times yesterday I wept like a child; I could not help it; first 
in parting with Longfellow, next in parting with you, and lastly 
as I left my mother and my sister." To Longfellow he wrote: "I 
could not speak to you as we parted ; my soul was too full ; only 
tears would flow. Your friendship and dear Fanny's [Mrs. Long- 
fellow] have been among my few treasures, like gold unchanging. 
From a grateful heart I now thank you for your true and constant 
friendship. God bless you both, ever dear friends, faithful and 
good!" One other instance of Sumner's affection for his per- 
sonal friends deserves mention here. I have said that Abraham 
Lincoln loved him and trusted him to the end. Indeed, in spite 
of some sharp political antagonisms, which would have shattered 
a friendship less deeply based, Lincoln showed Sumner more 
signs of personal regard than any other man in public service. 
When, on that sad morning of April 15, 1865, Lincoln lay on his 
dying-bed in Washington, Sumner sat by his side, holding his 
hand and sobbing as a child; and it was upon Charles Sumner's 
strong arm that Lincoln's son Robert stood leaning as the 
immortal President breathed his last. 

The relations between Sumner and Lincoln are such an im- 
portant part of the history of the times which we are here con- 
sidering that they call for a more extended notice. The fact 
to be emphasized is that Sumner's attitude toward slavery 
greatly influenced Lincoln; although the wise and cautious 
President did not look at the general question precisely as Sumner 
did. With Lincoln the supreme aim of the government in the 
Civil War, at least in the earlier periods of the war, was to restore 
the Union. Sumner, on the other hand, always looked upon the 
Southern Rebellion as being, what we all know it really was, 
slavery in arms. He beUeved, therefore, that the war, although 



12 

aimed primarily at the restoration of the Union, could not end, 
and ought not to end, without ending slavery also. 

When in the summer of 1862 Sumner was urging Lincoln 
to take the decisive step of issuing the edict of emancipation, 
the President said to his friend, "You, Sumner, are only a month 
or so ahead of me." These words of Lincoln were almost lit- 
erally true in respect of what was perhaps the greatest act of 
his life; for it was only a little later, i.e., on the 22d of September, 
1862, that the Proclamation of Emancipation was issued and the 
shackles which had fettered four millions of slaves were at one 
stroke and forever broken. To have done that great act, Gov- 
ernor Long once said, "to have at one cut ripped the cancer 
from the Republic, was to have attained a glory than which 
there can be no greater in human history." Of that immortal 
glory let Charles Sumner have the share to which impartial 
history says he was fully entitled. And in this connection, as 
we are thinking of the attitude of these two statesmen, the 
Executive and the senator, in respect of the freedman, let us 
remember that they were virtually of the same opinion as to 
what the national government should do for the newly emanci- 
pated negro. Did Lincoln think that the country owed the 
colored man a good education, even more than it owed him the 
right of suffrage? This was always Sumner's contention, who 
went even further in this direction of a wise and sane statesman- 
ship. For Sumner would have had the government give the 
negro a homestead as well as the school and the ballot. He 
would thus have had the freedman placed where, untrammelled 
by poverty and unhindered by ignorance, he could by his thrift 
and his knowledge prove himself capable of casting an intelligent 
vote. It was not then universal suffrage for the black man which 
Sumner advocated: it was rather impartial suffrage. "If you 
introduce," he said, "the test of the spelling-book, let it cut 
clear across; let it apply impartially to blacks and whites alike." 
The only difference of opinion between the two great comrades 
that ever threatened to destroy their friendship related to the 
question whose was the power of controlling reconstruction 
while the war was still in progress. Lincoln held that the power 



13 

belonged to the Executive, while Sumner contended that it 
belonged to Congress. The event proved that, so far as this 
question of reconstruction was concerned, Sumner was right 
and Lincoln was in error. All other questions touching the 
status of the negro or that of the Southern States which had 
been in rebeUion arose at a later period, after Lincoln's death. 
That the successful opposition by Senator Sumner to a project 
on which the President's heart was set caused no break in their 
personal friendship was due as much to the magnanimity of 
Sumner as to the greatness of Lincoln. One other illustration 
of the influence of our great anti-slavery senator over his friend, 
President Lincoln, calls for a passing mention. It was in the 
period when the two illustrious comrades were most intimate 
in their friendship, on March 4, 1865, that Abraham Lincoln 
gave his brief second Inaugural Address, a speech as memorable 
in many ways as his immortal words at Gettj^sburg. Toward 
the close of this Inaugural Lincoln said, referring clearly and 
strongly to the sin of slavery, "If God wills that this war con- 
tinue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred 
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop 
of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn 
with the sword, yet the judgments of the Lord are true and right- 
eous altogether." 

To return to Sumner's great hfe-work as ''the senator with a 
conscience," we note, first of all, that for several months after 
taking his seat in Congress in 1851 he remained silent upon all 
the questions which then came before the Senate. He was 
awaiting his time to speak to Congress and to the nation in 
behalf of human liberty. At length that time arrived. Claim- 
ing his right to discuss a resolution which brought the Fugitive 
Slave Law directly before the Senate, Sumner on the 26th 
of August, 1852, only a few days before Congress adjourned 
its session, delivered his first public speech against American 
slavery, — the most significant happening in the United States 
Senate since Daniel Webster's reply to Hayne. It was also an 
epitome of Sumner's whole public career. Still further, it 
marked the beginning of an epoch in our country's history. 



14 

It rang out the old even as it rang in the new. In this speech 
Sumner arraigned slavery in the name of that nationality which 
it had falsely called its own; he declared that the anti- slavery 
movement is from the Everlasting Arm; he indicted the Fugitive 
Slave Bill, to quote his own words, ''in the name of the Con- 
stitution which it violates, of my country which it dishonors, 
of humanity which it disowns, of Christianity which it offends"; 
he showed by the indisputable facts of current history that the 
act ''had not that essential support in the public conscience of 
the States where it was designed to be enforced without which 
any law becomes a dead letter"; and he closed with the grandly 
simple peroration : — 

"Mindful of the lowly whom it pursues, mindful of the good 
men perplexed by its requirements, in the name of Charity, in 
the name of the Constitution, repeal this enactment." Were 
not these words well and bravely said? And was not this true 
Christian warrior, this godly man, who was without fear and 
above reproach, the champion of that "Stern Lawgiver" of 
whom Wordsworth sang: — 

"Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong; 
And the most ancient Heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong." 

The novel and pregnant phrase, "Freedom National, Slavery 
Sectional," which was first used in this speech of Sumner's, soon 
became the watchword and the rallying cry of the new Free Soil 
party, later the Republican party. But, at the time when the 
Massachusetts senator uttered these words, slavery had appar- 
ently subdued to its will the entire nation. It controlled our 
politics. It ruled our trade and our commerce. It laid a pad- 
lock on the lips of nearly every Christian minister in the land; 
while it had poisoned at their source those social relations which 
should keep men generous and sweet-tempered in their inter- 
course with one another. After Sumner had delivered in the 
Senate his first speech against slavery, he was made to feel, even 
as in my own boyhood I had felt, the social ostracism which 
every one then encountered who dared to say a word, or to do 
the smallest deed, against the giant wrong. Never shall I forget 



16 

the evening in 1861 when, as I was walking with Mr. Sumner 
through the residential quarter of the city of Baltimore, he 
pointed to one after another of the stately mansions which we 
were passing, and said with a tone of pathetic sadness in his 
voice: ''When I came to Washington, ten years ago, all these 
houses were opened to me, and I was always a welcome guest. 
But ever since my anti- slavery speech in the Senate, every one 
of these brownstone fronts has been closed against me." I did 
not then know what, indeed, I have only recently learned, that 
as early as 1848, three years before he went to Washington, the 
expression of his anti -slavery convictions had cost him in his 
native city of Boston a similar loss of social recognition. Rid- 
ing one day down Beacon Street with his friend Richard Henry 
Dana, he said sadly: ''The time was when there was hardly a 
house within two miles of this place where I was not a welcome 
guest. Now hardly one is opened to me." This is the state of 
things of which we need to remind ourselves when we think of 
that now long ago time which saw the advent of Charles Sumner 
to the Senate of the United States. For this godly man was most 
emphatically what Theodore Parker had desired that he should 
be, "the senator with a conscience." He saw all his political 
duties "in the beams of the Everlasting Sun of Truth." In 
a very real sense Sumner incarnated the conscience of the North 
in respect of human slavery; and it was but natural that he 
should become its chief representative. From the moment of 
his first speech in the Senate the slave -holding power through- 
out the land knew that, at last, it had met its match, if not its 
master. These hitherto so insolent defenders of the slave sys- 
tem could then say with Macbeth: — 

"We but teach 
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return 
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice 
Commends the ingredients of our poison 'd chalice 
To our own hps." 

I can see him now as on that midsummer day, nearly sixty 
years ago, he stood proudly erect in his place in the Senate; as 
George William Curtis once pictured him, — "with the light of 



16 

spotless youth upon his face, towermg, dauntless, radiant; the 
indomitable Puritan, speaking not for his State alone, nor for 
his country only, but for human rights ever^'where and always; 
forecasting the future, heralding the New America." Then 
followed the speeches which Sumner made, called forth by the 
violation of the Missouri Compromise, — "The Crime against 
Kansas," as he forcibly, but truly, characterized it. Of these 
speeches the most vigorous and most telling was that of June 
28, 1854. In his former speeches he had attacked the slave 
power, showing the crimes of which it had been guilty and ex- 
posing the corrupt and corrupting character of that tyrannical 
rule under which Liberty had no rights that the government 
was bound to respect. The slave -masters themselves he had 
hardly alluded to, save as they were an inseparable part of the 
slave power. But the time had come when there was no longer 
any virtue in forbearance toward his insolent assailants, the 
men who cracked the plantation whip in the halls of Congress 
and practised on their political peers the tactics of the overseer 
and the slave-driver. The invective of Sumner's speech was 
indeed severe; but who will now say it was uncalled for or un- 
deserved? There are occasions when the champion of justice 
must silence the bully and shame the coward ; and Charles Sum- 
ner plied the scourge of a righteous wrath in that chamber of 
legislation, as of old the whip of knotted cords was used in the 
temple at Jerusalem. His great speech on ''The Crime against 
Kansas," given two years later on May 19, 1856, led to the cow- 
ardly and brutal attack by Preston Brooks which nearly cost 
Sumner his life and impaired his usefulness during all the years 
that succeeded the shameful event. 

It is interesting to note, in passing, that no other speech ever 
delivered in the United States Congress found such a large and 
world-wide hearing as this particular anti- slavery speech of 
Sumner's. Fully a million copies of it were distributed. It was 
reprinted and widely circulated in England and was translated 
into both Welsh and German. Truly of Sumner's words on 
human freedom we may say, as Emerson said of Concord's em- 
battled farmers by the rude bridge that arched the flood, he 



17 

"fired the shot heard round the world." No candid reader of 
that speech to-day can find anything severe in it but the severity 
of truth; anything objectionable in it, unless it be its formidable 
array of objections to the slave power's arrogance and usurpa- 
tions. It was an argument not for abolition or emancipation, 
but simply for the non-extension of slavery. It painted in 
strong colors the undeniable encroachments of the South and 
described in plain terms the character of the institution which 
was seeking a new foothold on soil consecrated to freedom. It 
was never answered in debate. No voice, no pen, no peaceful 
and legitimate weapon of controversy, was used to war against 
its serried facts and well-marshalled arguments. The bludgeon 
was the only tool which the craven slave power could employ. 
But the event which raised Brooks, the plantation Hotspur, to 
the rank of a hero in the South, awakened the slumbering moral 
sense of the North and threw off once and forever the mask under 
which slavery had hitherto disguised its true character. 

It is the intrinsic nature of evil to run to madness; and the 
slave power prepared the way for its own overthrow, first by 
this cowardly assault on Charles Sumner, next by its traitorous 
attack on Fort Sumter, and, finally, by its foul murder of Abraham 
Lincoln. Thus did the career of the Massachusetts senator 
enter into the mysterious web of fate in which the destinies of 
men and nations are overruled; when, through the fine-spun 
threads of human wrong-doing, the pattern of God is slowly, 
but surely, wrought. Henceforth the words of Sumner against 
the mighty injustice of slavery were sure to go like winged arrows 
straight to their mark; for he had been perfected through suf- 
fering. 

The event just described, the assault upon Sumner by Preston 
Brooks, calls for a more extended discussion. A Boston journal, 
anticipating the hundredth anniversary of Sumner's birth, the 
6th of January, 1911, published in its Sunday edition on last 
New Year's Day a long article entitled "Charles Sumner as his 
Friends and Enemies saw him." This article, while giving a 
wholly inadequate analysis of Sumner's personality and character 
as well as an absurdly brief report of his eminent public services, 



18 

is chiefly noteworthy as occupying several columns of the paper 
with an attempt to explain away the ruffianism of the Southern 
Congressman's cowardly assault. We are even told that the 
real assailant was Sumner himself, not the South Carolinian bully. 
The Massachusetts senator, it is said, in his speech on ''The 
Crime against Kansas," not only denounced the State of South 
Carolina, but also showered personal abuse upon the senator 
from that State, Senator Butler, who at the time was absent 
from the Senate Chamber. The facts are these. Sumner had 
been a little more than four years in the United States Senate. 
For the opportunity to deliver his first speech he had been com- 
pelled to wait for months, until he could claim his senatorial 
right to speak. During all this time he had to submit to the 
taunts which were flung at him, and to remove as best he could 
the obstacles put in his way, by the arrogant slave -holding 
senators from the South. Insulted by some of these men, when 
he closed his first great address on the slave question; one of 
them saying that, ''while the ravings of a maniac might be dan- 
gerous, the barking of a puppy never did any harm"; forced to 
listen to the contempt poured upon him by Senator Butler, who 
spoke of his "vapid rhetoric" and called him "a plunging agi- 
tator actuated by a pseudo-philanthropy"; further vilified by 
other slave-holding senators who in later debates denounced 
him as "a sneaking, sinuous, snake-like poltroon," — Charles 
Sumner made in May, 1856, his significant speech on "The Crime 
against Kansas." It was, by the way, while delivering this 
address, that to Senator Butler, who had interrupted him by 
asking whether, as a Massachusetts man, he would send back 
a fugitive slave into bondage, Sumner made the memorable 
reply: "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?" 
Even during Sumner's delivery of this speech several of the 
Southern senators kept up so much conversation and laughter 
among themselves that more than once they were called to 
order; while throughout the five hours occupied by Sumner, 
at two successive daily sessions of the Senate, he was not once 
spoken to by the presiding officer, — a conclusive proof that Sum- 
ner had not gone beyond the recognized proprieties of the occa- 



19 

sion in his remarks concerning slavery and the slave-holding lords. 
To all this let it be added that, in his abuse of Sumner, Senator 
Butler even went so far as to charge upon the Massachusetts 
senator his own infirmity of being an habitual drunkard ; saying, 
in his maudlin fashion, that Sumner '^ didn't know half the time 
what he was talking about." More than this, this Butler of 
South Carolina, no near relative of the Brooks who struck Sumner 
down, being only a second cousin of his, had attempted to viUfy 
before the Senate our good Old Bay State; saying that it was 
"nothing but an anti-nigger State," and that, when her citizens 
abolished slavery in Massachusetts, the little darkies who were 
left there were sent about as puppies to be taken by those who 
would feed them! 

Touched to the quick by this long-continued insolence, these 
rude manners and maUcious taunts, of the slave-holding senators, 
Sumner resolved that, as the whole arsenal of God was his to use 
in defence of human freedom, he would employ all its weapons. 
Referring to Senator Butler, whose absence from the Senate 
on the day set down for Sumner's speech the Massachusetts 
senator could neither have foreseen nor have prevented, he said 
of him that ''he had chosen a mistress, who, though ugly to 
others, is always lovely to him: I mean," he added, "the Harlot 
Slavery"; while, in speaking of Butler's State, he said, "Kansas 
in her vahant struggle against oppression has done more for 
civilization than South Carolina has ever done," adding these 
striking words: "Ah! Sir: I tell you that Kansas, welcomed as 
a free State, a ministering angel shall be to the Repubhc, when 
South Carolina, in the cloak of darkness which she hugs, lies 
howling." 

Did Charles Sumner in saying this go too far? Impartial his- 
tory answers, "No." Did he here use, as has often been charged 
against him, an "indecent" figure of speech when he spoke of 
slavery as the harlot, the accepted mistress of the slave-holding 
senator? To this question also impartial history gives in reply 
an emphatic "No." Passing over the fact that the world-famous 
Chevalier Bayard, the man who was "without fear and above 
reproach," used in his day the same metaphor, saying that, "as 



20 

is the mistress, so will her valet be"; omitting also the frequent 
use of this figure of speech by Shakspere, — the Muse of History 
will be content with simply reminding us that no less than eight 
times does this obnoxious word ''harlot" appear in the New 
Testament; while the Master of all Christians once said to the 
self-righteous Pharisees who stood about him, ''The very harlots 
shall go into the kingdom of God before you." So falls to the 
ground the mistaken and not always well-meant effort to white- 
wash the memory of a dastardly bully, whose act has no defence 
even in the court of the prize ring, where to strike a man who 
cannot strike back is reckoned rank cowardice. And so rises 
into clearer light the character of Charles Sumner, who carried 
away from the assault which so nearly cost him his life no trace 
of a resentful spirit, but, when asked in after-years how he felt 
towards his assailant, replied: "Only as to a brick that should 
fall upon my head from a chimney. He was the unconscious 
agent of a malign power." 

A remark like this is a window through which we may look into 
the speaker's inmost heart, and see there the true source of his 
religious faith. By birth and training Sumner was a Unitarian; 
but he left to others the task of weighing and appraising his 
beliefs. His Methodist friend. Bishop Haven, of Boston, said, 
"It was Christianity without Christ that Sumner felt and 
preached and practised, — a Christianity," he went on to say, 
"not of doctrine, but of life." That Sumner's lofty ethical 
idealism was nurtured by a deep fountain of rehgion within his 
soul, his evangehcal friend failed to recognize; and this the 
superficial student of his character is apt even now to overlook. 
Yet one who knew him well once said of Sumner, "I never knew 
a man with a firmer grasp upon faith in the good God." 

When, two years before his death, he met in France some of 
the eminent Frenchmen whom he knew, he said to them: "You 
wish to found here a republic without religion. In America we 
should consider such an undertaking chimerical and doomed to 
certain defeat." But twelve years before this, when making 
in the United States Senate his last great speech against "The 
Barbarism of Slavery," Sumner said, "I should suppress the 



21 

emotion natural to such an occasion as this if I did not declare 
on the threshold my gratitude to that Supreme Being through 
whose benign care I am enabled, after much suffering and many 
changes, once again to resume my duties here, and to speak for 
the cause so near my heart." 

Sumner's family had a pew in King's Chapel; and during his 
residence in Boston after his father's death he occupied his place 
at the head of the pew. But neither there nor, alas! in any 
other ''liberal church" in that old-time Boston could Sumner 
have heard a Christianity preached which concerned itself with 
the slave or with that consecrated warfare against American 
slavery to which he gave his life. More significant, as bearing 
upon Sumner's religion, is the fact that during most of the 
impressionable years of his early manhood he enjoyed the inti- 
mate personal friendship of William Ellery Channing. The 
influence over Sumner of this great Unitarian divine made not 
only for righteousness and philanthropy, but also for that pure 
and undefiled rehgion whose best fruits are seen in such personal 
virtues and in such an unselfish devotion to human welfare as 
were the ruling traits of the character of this uncorrupt and white- 
souled statesman. 

How our hero, or let us now call him the nation's hero, spent 
the time from May, 1856, to December, 1859, when he returned 
to his place in the United States Senate, is told us with interesting 
details by his different biographers. He was an invalid seeking 
the health that seemed so long in returning. In January, 1857, 
while he was in his Boston home, he was re-elected, almost 
unanimously, to the Senate of the United States, and in Febru- 
ary journeyed to Washington and took again the oath of office. 
But his home physician advised a trip to Europe, that he might 
obtain abroad the absolute rest which his bodily condition de- 
manded. From this journey, on which he received almost un- 
precedented attentions from the most eminent men and women 
of all the countries which he visited, he returned home to 
Boston on the 19th of November, 1857, far indeed from well, 
but eager to resume his senatorial labors. The following April 
he suffered from a relapse; and, yielding again, but with great 



22 

reluctance, to his doctor's advice, he sailed for the second time 
in quest of health to the lands of the Old World, leaving New 
York on May 22, 1858, just two years after the assault by Brooks. 
This time he was treated for his spinal injuries by the world's 
greatest specialist for nervous disease. Dr. Brown -Sequard, 
of Paris. The bodily pain caused by this treatment, this emi- 
nent physician once remarked, was the greatest suffering which 
can be inflicted on a mortal man. Seven times Sumner bore 
the terrible burning, refusing to take any anaesthetic; but the 
great senator's unparalleled fortitude had its reward in the par- 
tial recovery of his health. The complete recovery never came; 
and at the last, in 1874, the spinal complaint was complicated 
by angina pectoris, caused by the Paris treatment, and of this 
disease he died. 

This second journey through Europe was for Sunmer another 
delightful sojourn in famous localities and among his eminent 
and intimate friends abroad. He came back to Boston in Novem- 
ber, 1859, and in the following month resumed his public service 
in Washington. A happy incident attending this long-continued 
quest of health was his reception, while in Boston in the summer 
of 1856, of the honorary degree of LL.D., conferred upon him 
by the two colleges Amherst and Yale. His own Alma Mater 
gave him the same degree, as we have seen, three years after 
this, in 1859. 

In his place in the Senate, on the 4th of June, 1860, Sumner 
gave what may well be called the oratorical death-blow to the 
iniquitous wrong to whose destruction he had consecrated his 
life. His address at this time was upon ''The Barbarism of 
Slavery." It was the last speech on the slavery question which 
was given in Congress, and virtually closed the great debate. 
After 1860 the aboUtion of human bondage in this country was 
referred to the stern arbitrament of war. 

In this connection I may be pardoned if I mention the fact that 
a month later, on July 18, 1860, in my valedictory oration at the 
Harvard College Commencement', I spoke of Sumner, who was 
then sitting on the platform quite near me as I was speaking, 
as ''the uncorrupt statesman, who had dared to assail the inso- 



23 

lence of barbarous wrong intrenched in its strongholds of laws 
and institutions." This reference to Sumner and his speech 
brought upon me a storm of mingled hisses and applause, and 
created an unusual excitement. As one of my Southern class- 
mates, afterwards a distinguished officer in the Confederate 
Army, was leaving the church, he said to another member of 
the class, who was later a general in the Union Army, ''That 
valedictory means civil war." 

For myself personally it meant the warm friendship of the 
great senator, which lasted until his death. One visit which I 
paid him in Washington I shall never forget. It was on Christmas 
Day, 1861. As I approached his house in F Street, not far from 
14th Street, I saw him coming from the direction of the White 
House and went to meet him. After his customary cordial 
greeting, he said to me, ''You are probably the first person in 
the world to be told of one of the most memorable triumphs of 
international justice in these modern days." He then told me 
that President Lincoln had just assured him that there would be 
no war with England on account of the "Trent" affair, but that 
Mason and Slidell would be set free, and would be allowed to 
go to Europe as the ambassadors of the Confederacy to England 
and France. The source of the senator's information was the 
meeting of Lincoln's cabinet that morning, which by special 
invitation he had just attended, and at which every cabinet 
oflJcer, except the Postmaster-General, had at first declared 
himself to be opposed to the pohcy urged by Sumner and finally 
adopted by Lincoln. Sumner was then at the head of the most 
important committee of the Senate, the Committee on Foreign 
Relations; and to him more than to any other man, except the 
President, was due the great triumph of justice and right in this 
exciting affair. Against the violent drift of public opinion 
throughout the North, which mistakenly held that to keep 
these men as our prisoners would weaken the Confederacy, 
Sumner stood as firm and immovable as a rock in a tempest, 
justifying Lincoln's decision on the high ground of the true 
principles of international relations. This victory for humanity, 
and, as it afterward proved, a victory for the Union cause in 



24 

our Civil War, was the result, humanly speaking, of the con- 
sunmiate statesmanship of Charles Sumner, reinforced by his 
unswerving fidelity to the right as God gave him to see the right. 

It may be well here to contrast with this noble and states- 
man-like action of Sumner in the "Trent" affair the attitude of 
Mr. Gideon Welles, who has seeently taken occasion to asperse 
the memory of our Massachusetts senator. Mr. Welles was at 
the time Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy, and made haste to 
give out the declaration that the act of Captain Wilkes in seiz- 
ing the two Confederate representatives, Mason and Slidell, was 
''marked with intelligence, ability, decision, and firmness, and 
has the emphatic approval of the Navy Department." No one 
to-day can doubt that in this important case Charles Sumner in 
saying that this act of the commander of our naval ship was 
both unjust and unwise, and in bringing not only President 
Lincoln, but the entire North to his way of thinking, carried off 
the honors. And the same contrast may be seen between the 
short-sighted pohcies of Mr. Welles as Secretary of the Navy 
under Andrew Johnson and the clear moral vision and broad, 
constructive statesmanship of Senator Sumner. 

The contemplation of a great moral character like this is at 
once elevating and ennobling. But Charles Sumner was a man 
whose personality was easily misunderstood; and to-day, as 
in his lifetime, many persons are accustomed to emphasize 
unduly what they call his faiUngs and his faults. A valued 
friend has lately written me concerning Sumner, saying, "There 
is much PhiUstine stock in me, and a man who shows himself 
unpractical is apt to get a bad mark in my books, more especially 
if he hasn't humor and is a good deal interested in himself." 
This is an excellent summary of the alleged defects in Sumner's 
character : — 

First, his being unpractical. 

Second, his having no humor. 

Third, his thinking too highly of himself. 

Let us look into them. If Sumner's ethical idealism, his un- 
swerving loyalty to the right, implies, as its accompanying de- 
fect, a lack of practical wisdom in always employing the best 



25 

means for securing a desired end, then this failing may be ad- 
mitted. But is not this shortcoming, if so it may be called, the 
defect of a great quality? Sumner himself has told us that he 
"saw all his duties in the beams of the Everlasting Sun of Truth " ; 
and a too concentrated look at the sunlight may dim even the 
strongest sight and obscure those paths to immediate success 
which lesser men more easily perceive and more readily pursue. 
So far, however, as the life-work of Sumner is concerned, the 
overthrow of the most barbarous institution that ever threatened 
a nation's peace and safety, this charge of unpracticalness falls 
to the ground. Charles Sumner accomplished the thing on which 
his mind and heart were fixed. With the help of God and the 
assistance of other men he won the end which he sought. No 
loyalty to ideas that was less strenuous than his could have 
gained this splendid victory; while, in respect of his unfaltering 
fidelity to human freedom, time has long since brought around 
the popular judgment to his own. If to have been the victorious 
champion of such a cause is to have been '^ unpractical," then, 
in the great moral conflicts in which we are engaged to-day, 
may Heaven send us leaders who are not too practical! 

And let us also remember that this charge of being unpractical 
is chiefly aimed at the great senator because of what was done 
or was left undone by him during the last few years of his public 
hfe, — at a time when, as his friend Judge Hoar once said, "In 
advancing age and still striving to bear up and do his work, 
under a terrible burden of shattered health and worn nerves, 
he made judgments which some of us have thought unjust and 
severed associations which some of us would gladly have pre- 
served." 

Another true and tried friend of Sumner, the late Rev. Dr. 
James Freeman Clarke, tells us how at one time during this 
later period of his senatorial career Sumner found himself unable 
one day to remain in his place in the Senate Chamber. "I went 
back," he said, "to my own house deeply discouraged; and the 
tears came to my eyes thinking I could do no more work for 
my race or my country." Then it was that the disheartened 
senator took up a volume of Milton and opened it mechanically. 



26 

The page before him had on it one of Milton's Sonnets and, 
when Sumner read the great poet's immortal lines, — 

"What supports me, dost thou ask? 
The conscience, friend, to have lost [my eyes] o'erplied 
In liberty's defence, my noble task," — 

his hope and courage returned, and at his own noble task he la- 
bored on until for him that work was done. Surely, it is better 
to recall in Sumner's honor an event like this than to blame him 
for hasty words spoken or hasty actions done in those last years, 
when the tired statesman, like a broken-down soldier, remained 
at duty's post and to the end discharged his every obligation. 

That, in passing ill-considered judgments and in advocating 
some measures whereby he separated himself from those who 
would naturally have been his associates and allies, Sumner 
showed a lack of tact and a want of political sagacity may be 
freely admitted. To this extent he may be said to have been in 
his later years '^ unpractical." But, "lest we forget," let us 
remind ourselves here that, in the efforts which the Massachu- 
etts senator made to secure the safety and uplifting of the 
newly emancipated negroes of the South, Sumner always urged 
the claim of the freedman to receive a homestead and a good 
education as well as the suffrage. In his recent Life of Sumner 
in the series of "American Crisis Biographies," Professor Haynes 
tells us that our senator strove most earnestly to impose, as 
further requisites for reconstruction, the provision of home- 
steads for the freedmen and of free schools, in which there should 
be no discrimination of race and color; but his efforts were 
defeated. To the end of his life, Sumner felt deep disappointment 
at this failure to secure free schools and homesteads, — a disap- 
ijointment which, at one time, was so bitter that he left the 
Senate Chamber, and, when he reached his home, his grief found 
vent in tears. In wise and practical statesmanship may we not 
say that Sumner's course at this time was far in advance of that 
which his colleagues in Congress displayed? One word more. 
The broad and wise statesmanship of Charles Sumner during 
his long period of public service took in many other interests 



27 

besides that of human freedom. As we have already seen, he 
was the successful champion, in the famous ''Trent" affair, of 
principles of international justice which saved us from a war 
with England in 1861, and estabhshed for all coming time a 
righteous precedent to govern us in our relations with foreign 
powers. From the long and bitter conflict between Congress 
and the administration concerning the annexation of San Do- 
mingo, on which President Grant had set his heart, — a conflict 
in which the Massachusetts senator (who was suffering at the 
time from nervous weakness) too often allowed his feelings to 
get the better of his judgment, — Sumner came out victorious. 
As was truly said of this issue, ''Charles Sumner had again 
helped to keep the country right, though at terrible cost to him- 
self." And through his long career in Congress many a wise 
and practical measure for the benefit of the pubhc had no more 
able or intelligent and successful advocate than our "senator 
with a conscience." It is enough in this connection to note 
Sumner's efforts to secure lower postal rates and simpler classi- 
fication of the pubhc statutes and an increase in pay to the en- 
listed men in our navy; his earnest advocacy of international 
copyright, of the reform of our consular appointments, and the 
adoption of the metric system; and, finally, his successful cham- 
pionship in 1867 of the accession of Alaska. To this day Sumner's 
three hours' speech in the Senate on the resources of this then 
almost unknown Russian America, to which Territory Sumner 
himself gave the name Alaska, is a marvellous and compre- 
hensive presentation of what that far-off section of our country 
has shown itself to be. 

The second fault, or weakness, which my friend finds in Mr. 
Sumner is that he had no humor. To any one who knew the 
great senator this charge itself is humorous. The correct thing 
to say is simply that with Sumner humor was not usually his 
strong point. He took himself, as he took hfe, seriously. Not- 
withstanding, however, what his friend, William Wetmore Story, 
said of him, that in his youth he was put off his feet by the least 
-persiflage; notwithstanding, too, what Dr. Holmes is reported 
to have said of Sumner, that "a pleasantry which would have 



28 

set a company laughing bewildered and distressed him"; and 
in spite also of the testimony of his intimate friend, Carl Schurz, 
that our great senator "seemed never to understand the fun and 
humor of Abraham Lincoln," — yet other friends of Sumner have 
testified that at the social board, and especially toward his 
guests in his own home, he contributed mirth as well as wisdom; 
while the reader of the printed reports of Sumner's speeches will 
note that they are often punctuated by the reporter's parenthesis, 
in which the word "laughter" appears. To have made such 
audiences as the Massachusetts senator usually addressed in- 
dulge in any laughter cannot be said of a man who was alto- 
gether destitute of humor. It is, indeed, true that, in respect of 
the quality which we are now considering, no two men could have 
been more unhke than were Abraham Lincoln and Charles 
Sumner; but it is a fact, perhaps not generally known, that the 
great President's fondness for the droll witticisms of "Petroleum 
V. Nasby" (of whom Lincoln once said to Sumner, "For the 
genius to write these things I would gladly give up my high 
office") led him to initiate his Massachusetts friend into a real 
liking for this funny writer. 

So fond did Sumner become of this author's banter that we 
find him, on one occasion, quoting against his pro-slavery oppo- 
nents in the Senate the verse of one of Nasby's so called "hymns," 
which runs: — 

"Shall niggers black tliis land possess, 
And mix with us up here? 
Oh, no, my friends! I rayther guess 
We'll never stand that 'ere." 

Such a humorous proceeding may not have been a usual thing 
with a man who was dead in earnest in his warfare against 
American slavery; but it certainly does show that he was not 
wholly destitute of humor. In fact, the chmax of the argument 
in favor of Sumner's love of jest and banter is reached, when we 
find this highly cultured scholar actually writing the introduction 
to the permanent edition of Petroleum V. Nasby's "Letters"! 

Let me add, as the recent testimony on this point of a personal 
friend, that, whenever Sumner came to Boston, he was sure to 



29 

call often upon his intimate friend, the Methodist bishop, 
Gilbert Haven. At that time Bishop Haven had a room in the 
Zion's Herald Building in Boston; and, said the publisher of that 
paper to my informant, "from the time Sumner entered his 
friend's room till he went away it was ringing with their laughter 
and hilarity." 

As to Sumner's pleasantries when with friends, I recall his 
amused look and the sparkle of suppressed merriment in his eyes 
when once, in the library of his home in Washington, I said to 
him, "Do you know how often you have asked me when I have 
come to see you whether you could do anything for me?" "Well," 
he replied, laughing as he spoke, "so many of my callers do have 
an axe to grind that I have probably got into the habit of putting 
the same question to every one." Let me here add, though it is 
a digression from my present theme, that when, at a later date, 
I asked our senator to help me to get a position in the navy for a 
young friend of mine, he responded at once, and soon secured the 
appointment asked for. And this naval engineer, who has Uved 
to be an honor to the government that appointed him, is but 
one of a host of the personal beneficiaries of Senator Sumner. 
In his early manhood he was influential in having Nathaniel 
Hawthorne made surveyor at the Salem custom-house, — a posi- 
tion which, humanly speaking, enabled the great novelist to give 
to the world his romance of "The Scarlet Letter." Later in his 
life Sumner urged President Lincoln to appoint Salmon P. Chase 
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; and, 
finally, let us not forget that in 1870, when a much-needed pen- 
sion for the widow of Abraham Lincoln had been held back by 
one Congress after another, Sumner succeeded in having the 
pension granted, in spite of the stubborn opposition of every 
member of the Senate committee to which it had been referred. 
Truly, then, may it be said of Charles Sumner that, while in a 
life devoted to high aims and lofty moral purposes his sense of 
humor was but seldom called into exercise, he chose that better 
part which can never be taken from our remembrance of him, — 
his constant and unselfish acts of kindness and of love. 

One other foible in Sumner's character which my friend pointed 



30 

out was that he was a good deal interested in himself. This is 
sometimes spoken of as the great senator's love of deference and 
approval. In his early hfe he was an exceptionally modest young 
man. The unusual attentions which were showered upon him 
in Europe on the occasion of his first tour abroad left him an 
unspoiled youth. The lionizing which he then received had not 
turned his head in the least. In after-years his well-earned fame 
gave him no doubt a heightened appreciation of his own powers. 
But Sumner's love of commendation was rather, as Senator 
George F. Hoar once said of it, a love of sympathy. If it must 
be called a defect, it is but another defect of a great quahty, — 
the other side of that honest desire for merited recognition which 
is almost inseparable from a consciousness of superiority and an 
intense moral earnestness. But let it be remembered that, with 
Sumner, approval was a thing which it was always more blessed 
for him to give than to receive. Nor did he ever stoop to the 
shifty devices of the mere courtier or to the trickeries of the self- 
seeking politician in order to win the praise of men. I strongly 
doubt if any one of Sumner's many and warmly attached 
friends were ever troubled by this infirmity of his. Upon them he 
never practised it. His unvarying attitude to all who came 
closest to him as a man was that of genial and hearty sympathy. 
We knew him but to love him. If in the last years of his public 
life, to which reference has already been made, our great senator 
showed at times what seemed to be a domineering spirit, and 
even assumed toward his colleagues a lecturing attitude, let 
us keep in mind the extenuating circumstances. These were the 
foibles of a sick man who was old before his time, and who to his 
dying day bore uncomplainingly the burden of shattered nerves 
and broken health. The usual outflow from such strength as he 
still possessed was such a pouring forth of tenderness and thought- 
ful love as we rarely see in those whom we call the great men of 
the earth. 

As our white -souled statesman's useful and memorable life 
drew to a close, a single dark cloud gathered in the political sky 
above him. This was the resolution of censure upon him passed 
by the legislature of Massachusetts because he had introduced 



31 

and advocated in Congress a bill providing that the names of 
battles with fellow-citizens should not be continued in the Army 
Register or placed on the regimental colors of the United States. 
Two days before his death he had the supreme happiness to see 
this cloud disperse. A colored member of our State legislature 
had hastened to Washington to give to Mr. Sumner the later 
resolution which rescinded the legislative censure. ''The dear 
old Commonwealth has spoken for me," he said. "It is enough." 
In that timely act of the Boston representative I seem to see 
the colored race placing upon the brow of the dying senator its 
crown of bright immortelles ; and to-day, in this centennial year 
of Charles Sumner, those flowers are blooming afresh. They 
will never cease to bloom. Nothing that I have said, nothing 
that I can say, will give to them a fairer hue or add to their 
undying fragrance. I can only, in affectionate imagination, 
place on the simple monument upon Charles Sumner's grave in 
Mount Auburn the words of the great beatitude: ''Blessed are 
the pure in heart; for they shall see God." 



32 



POEM. 

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER. 

(By pennisaion of Houghton Mifflin Co., publishers of Whittier's Complete Works.) 



SUMNER. 

"I am not one who has disgraced beauty or sentiment by deformity of conduct, or the 
maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave; but, by the grace of God, I have kept 
my life unsullied." — Milton's "Defence of the People of England." 



Mother State! the winds of March 
Blew chill o'er Auburn's Field of God, 

Where, slow, beneath a leaden arch 
Of sky, thy mourning children trod. 

And now, with all thy woods in leaf, 
Thy fields in flower, beside thy dead 

Thou sittest, in thy robes of grief, 
A Rachel yet uncomforted! 

And once again the organ swells. 

Once more the flag is half-way hung. 

And yet again the mournful bells 
In all thy steeple-towers are rung. 

And I, obedient to thy will, 
Have come a simple wreath to lay. 

Superfluous, on a grave that still 

Is sweet with all the flowers of May. 

1 take, with awe, the task assigned; 

It may be that my friend might miss, 
In his new sphere of heart and mind. 
Some token from my hand in this. 

By many a tender memory moved, 
Along the past my thought I send; 

The record of the cause he loved 
Is the best record of its friend. 

No trumpet sounded in his ear. 

He saw not Sinai's cloud and flame, 

But never yet to Hebrew seer 
A clearer voice of duty came. 

God said: "Break thou these yokes; undo 
These heavy burdens. I ordain 

A work to last thy whole life through, 
A ministry of strife and pain. 



"Forego thy dreams of lettered ease. 
Put thou the scholar's promise by. 

The rights of man are more than these." 
He heard, and answered: "Here am I!' 

He set his face against the blast, 
His feet against the flinty shard. 

Till the hard service grew, at last. 
Its own exceeding great reward. 

Lifted like Saul's above the crowd. 

Upon his kingly forehead fell 
The first sharp bolt of Slavery's cloud, 

Launched at the truth he urged so well. 

Ah! never yet, at rack or stake. 

Was sorer loss made Freedom's gain, 

Than his, who suffered for her sake 
The beak-torn Titan's lingering pain! 

The fixed star of his faith, through all 
Loss, doubt, and peril, shone the same; 

As through a night of storm, some tall, 
Strong lighthouse lifts its steady flame. 

Beyond the dust and smoke he saw 

The sheaves of freedom's large increase, 

The holy fanes of equal law, 
The New Jerusalem of peace. 

The weak might fear, the worldling mock. 
The faint and blind of heart regret; 

All knew at last th' eternal rock 

On which his forward feet were set. 

The subtlest scheme of compromise 
Was folly to his purpose bold; 

The strongest mesh of party lies 
Weak to the simplest truth he told. 



33 



One language held his heart and lip, 
Straight onward to his goal he trod, 

And proved the highest statesmanship 
Obedience to the voice of God. 

No wail was in his voice, — none heard. 
When treason'sstorm-cloud blackest grew, 

The weakness of a doubtful word ; 
His duty, and the end, he knew. 

The first to smite, the first to spare; 

When once the hostile ensigns fell, 
He stretched out hands of generous care 

To lift the foe he fought so well. 

For there was nothing base or small 
Or craven in his soul's broad plan; 

Forgiving all things personal. 
He hated only wi'ong to man. 

The old traditions of his State, 

The memories of her great and good, 

Took from his life a fresher date. 
And in himself embodied stood. 

How felt the greed of gold and place, 
The venal crew that schemed and planned, 

The fine scorn of that haughty face. 
The spurning of that bribeless hand! 

If than Rome's tribunes statelier 

He wore his senatorial robe. 
His lofty port was all for her, 

The one dear spot on all the globe. 

If to the master's plea he gave 

The vast contempt his manhood felt. 

He saw a brother in the slave, — 
With man as equal man he dealt. 

Proud was he? If his presence kept 
Its grandeur wheresoe'er he trod, 

As if from Plutarch's gallery stepped 
The hero and the demigod. 

None failed, at least, to reach his ear. 
Nor want nor woe appealed in vain; 

The homesick soldier knew his cheer. 
And blessed him from his ward of pain. 

Safely his dearest friends may own 

The slight defect he never hid, 
The surface-blemish in the stone 

Of the tall, stately pyramid. 

Suffice it that he never brought 
His conscience to the public mart; 

But lived himself the truth he taught, 
White-souled, clean-handed, pure of heart. 



What if he felt the natural pride 
Of power in noble use, too true 

With thin humilities to hide 

The work he did, the lore he knew? 

Was he not just? Was any wronged 
By that assured self-estimate? 

He took but what to him belonged, 
Unenvious of another's state. 

Well might he heed the words he spake, 
And scan with care the written page 

Through which he still shall warm and wake 
The hearts of men from age to age. 

Ah! who shall blame him now because 
He solaced thus his hours of pain! 

Should not the o'erworn thresher pause. 
And hold to light his golden grain? 

No sense of humor dropped its oil 
On the hard ways his purpose went; 

Small play of fancy lightened toil; 
He spake alone the thing he meant. 

He loved his books, the Art that hints 
A beauty veiled behind its own, 

The graver's line, the pencil's tints. 
The chisel's shape evoked from stone. 

He cherished, void of selfish ends. 
The social courtesies that bless 

And sweeten life, and loved his friends 
With most unworldly tenderness. 

But still his tired eyes rarely learned 
The glad relief by Nature brought; 

Her mountain ranges never turned 
His current of persistent thought. 

The sea rolled chorus to his speech 

Three-banked like Latium's tall trireme, 

With laboring oars; the grove and beach 
Were Forum and the Academe. 

The sensuous joy from all things fair 
His strenuous bent of soul repressed, 

And left from youth to silvered hair 
Few hours for pleasure, none for rest. 

For all his life was poor without, 
O Nature, make the last amends! 

Train all thy flowers his grave about. 
And make thy singing-birds his friends! 

Revive again, thou summer rain. 

The broken turf upon his bed! 
Breathe, summer wind, thy tenderest strain 

Of low, sweet music overhead! 



34 



With calm and beauty symbolize 
The peace which follows long annoy, 

And lend our earth-bent, mourning eyes 
Some hint of his diviner joy. 

For safe with right and truth he is, 
As God lives he must live alway; 

There is no end for souls like his, 
No night for children of the day! 

Nor cant nor poor solicitudes 

Make weak his life's great argument; 
Small leisure his for frames and moods 

Who followed Duty where she went. 

The broad, fair fields of God he saw 
Beyond the bigot's narrow bound; 

The truths he moulded into law 
In Christ's beatitudes he found. 

His state-craft was the Golden Rule, 
His right of vote a sacred trust; 

Clear, over threat and ridicule. 

All heard his challenge: "Is it just?" 

And when the hour supreme had come. 
Not for himself a thought he gave; 

In that last pang of martyrdom. 

His care was for the half-freed slave. 



Not vainly dusky hands upbore, 

In prayer, the passing soul to heaven 

Whose mercy to his suffering poor 
Was service to the Master given. 

Long shall the good State's annals tell. 
Her children's children long be taught. 

How, praised or blamed, he guarded well 
The trust he neither shunned nor sought . 

If for one moment turned thy face, 
O Mother, from thy son, not long 

He waited calmly in his place 

The sure remorse which follows wrong. 

Forgiven be the State he loved 

The one brief lapse, the single blot; 

Forgotten be the stain removed, 
Her righted record shows it not! 

The lifted sword above her shield 

With jealous care shall guard his fame; 

The pine-tree on her ancient field 

To all the winds shall speak his name. 

The marble image of her son 

Her loving hands shall j'early crown. 
And from her pictured Pantheon 

His grand, majestic face look down. 



O State so passing rich before. 

Who now shall doubt thy highest claim? 
The world that counts thy jewels o'er 

Shall longest pause at Sumner's name! 



